NEW DELHI: Congress leader and former finance minister P Chidambaram on Tuesday cautioned against "celebrating" the 20.1 per cent surge in GDP growth in the April-June quarter of this fiscal, saying it was helped by a low base of the year-ago period and that the economy is still some distance away from the pre-pandemic level.
"We are still below the GDP level in the first quarter of the pre-pandemic year 2019-20. We have still some distance to go before the economy can be said to have achieved the pre-pandemic level," Chidambaram said in a series of tweets after the first quarter GDP numbers were out.
"Before we 'celebrate' the 20.1% GDP growth in Q1 (April-June) of 2021-22, please pause to consider the following.This 'growth' is on a low, actually negative, base of (-) 24.4% in Q1 of 2020-21," he said.
"That means that in the first quarter of this year, we have not fully recovered from the decline of last year," he said, adding that "in terms of economic activity, we are still behind in sectors such as Private Consumption, Gross Fixed Capital Formation and Imports."